Jeb reached over to his side. What had started as a pile of small iron sheets was now completely empty. Frowning, he looked to his other side. It was far less orderly than the initial pile had been, but Jeb was at least half sure that every sheet was now inscribed with the modular Enchantment.

Stretching his neck, he started to arrange them into smaller piles to make counting easier. By the time the the sixth bell rang, he had finished his count. Somehow he had miscounted when cutting the iron pieces, and so he had every Enchantment he needed plus an extra twelve. Ignoring the rumbling in his stomach, Jeb walked to to his field and began to carefully place the Enchantments onto the untilled soil.

When the last Enchantment was in its place, he pushed the smallest thread of Mana into one of them. If he had done everything right, the Mana would start flowing into the other pieces, and they would all start pulling from the ambient Mana. To his relief, a great slab of iron started to raise into the air before it slowly faded from his vision. Good to know that the Enchantment to make it transparent worked, he thought.

Finally giving in to the call of his stomach, Jeb walked to the cafeteria. He hoped that the Enchantment would have finished initializing and begun to start outputting data by the time that he came back. The cafeteria was nearly empty, which confused Jeb for a moment. It wasn’t that early. When he remembered Professor Bearson’s comment about the term break beginning, Jeb realized that he had not said goodbye to Declan or Catherine. To his surprise, the two of them walked into the cafeteria just a few minutes later.

“Good morning Jeb!” Catherine said, “how is your independent study progressing?”

“Good morning Catherine,” Jeb replied, trying to keep confusion out of his tone, “it’s going well, I think. I suppose that I’ll find out in a few minutes when I go back to the field.”

“Would you mind if we tagged along with you?” Declan asked.

Jeb shook his head, and the two hurried off to grab meals. The three ate a relaxed breakfast, and Jeb tried to remember the last time that he had slept in his own bed. Or, at least, his bed in the dormitory. The more time that Jeb spent in his workshop, the less connected he felt to the space that Dean Aquam had initially given him. The three ate in silence as Jeb tried to frame a question about what the two of them were doing at the Academy. By the time that they had finished eating, he still hadn’t been able to find a wording that was not outright aggressive or offensive. Shrugging it off, Jeb led his friends to the field.

Right at Jeb’s eye level, a few lines of text described the current conditions of the field. They were more or less what he expected. The field was fine, though unplanted.

“What does that say?” Declan asked, squinting at the semi-transparent writing.

Jeb realized that he and Professor Bearson had chosen to abbreviate most all of the content that the Enchantment provided. Rather than go through the entire process of explaining what each contraction, color, and orientation meant, however, Jeb simply replied, “the Enchantment says that the field is in good condition.”

The three of them spent a few more minutes catching up before Declan and Catherine left. Only as they disappeared did Jeb realize that he still did not have an answer to what they were doing in the Academy over the term break. The fact that both of them had discussed the Emporium made Jeb think that it had something to do with their presence. Pushing the question aside, he started planting the field with Alchemical Eyebright, remembering a comment that Professor Quicksilver had made off hand the other day about how the stock was running somewhat low.

As the plants started growing, if only slightly, his Enchantment started reporting the differnet nutrients that were being extracted and implanted. Jeb realized that he had not yet attached any of the Enchantments which would add nutrients as needed, and he quickly sketched one and watched as the piles of different minerals he had made slowly started to disappear. When he walked out of the shed that stored all the different materials, he blinked a few times.

It was as though he was once again working with the Yeast Energizer, the field in front of him moving faster and faster with each passing second. The readouts from the Enchantment, which he had set to update relatively quickly, began to strobe before moving even faster, until the information was simply blurring past him. Just as he started to realize what was happening, the world returned to normal speed, and he looked out over a field of fully grown Alchemical Eyebright. Jeb turned around and walked back into the shed, noting that a number of the piles had shrunk considerably. A few piles, on the other hand, had grown slightly, which he assumed had to do with the Eyebright fixing those nutrients into the field.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

None of the piles were completely empty, so Jeb did his best to ignore what had happened in the field and walked back outside, harvesting the field. He sent a note to Quicksilver after he finished piling the Alchemical Eybebright beside the field, before planting a non Alchemical plant. Dean Aquam had commented that the Weaver had requested more Managrass for Manaweave, so Jeb searched through his seed shed until he found the pile of White Managrass. As he carefully placed each seed into the soil, Jeb took a moment to think about how much easier it would be if he could plant the field with the activation of an Enchantment, rather than needing to manually walk the length over and over again.

The moment that he placed the final seed in the ground and stepped outside of the demarcated boundary he had made, the field once more sped up. Given how much faster Managrass grew, though, the world did not seem to blur by as they grew. Still, in just a few seconds, the entire field was full of the plants. Harvesting the plants, Jeb considered how much another Enchantment to harvest the field would help him as well.

“Well,” he mused aloud, looking at the two piles of perfectly grown plants in front of him, “at least I know that the system works.” He looked at the readout from his Enchantment, which told him that the field was low on a few nutrients. Sighing, Jeb realized that he was probably not going to be able to keep the field stocked with nutrients. He went back to his notebook, where he had written down the different Enchantments the different books had given for creating each of the materials he cared about. A small voice inside of him questioned whether the Enchantments would be able to get enough Mana to run, especially if the entire field began to run much more quickly. Jeb squashed the voice down. If the Academy wanted to speed up time within an area, he was sure that it could supply more Mana into the environment as well.

Now that he was no longer behind on any of the obligations he had made, Jeb went back to his room and slept. He wasn’t entirely sure how long he slept or what time he woke up, because he went directly to the Stacks. There, he quickly found Enchantments that Bearson had developed a few years earlier to plant and harvest a field. They were simple enough for Jeb to craft, and the field was soon running almost constantly, only pausing for moments at a time for Jeb to choose a different location for the new piles to go or a different plant to start growing.

Quicksilver and Bearson both came by on what Jeb thought of as the second day that the field was running, though the sun’s constant whirling made it hard for him to know for certain. Both looked at the field which looked to be playing a year of a farm in a minute, before turning to Jeb.

“Jeb,” Quicksilver began, before pausing.

“What did you do?” Bearson finished for him. “How did you speed time within the field so much?”

“I didn’t,” Jeb replied honestly, “as soon as the Enchantments were all up and running, the field started moving much more quickly. I assume that it’s something that the Academy is doing.”

Both nodded, though neither seemed particularly at ease with the situation. The three watched the frankly mesmerizing sight of plants constantly being grown and regrown in the same field before disappearing in a blink.

“What plants have you been growing?” Professor Quicksilver finally asked.

“I went through the list of Alchemicals that you said the department needed and programmed them into Professor Bearson’s Enchantment,” Jeb replied, eyes fixed on the field.

“I did not give you an Enchantment to do this,” Bearson replied, tone somewhat darker than Jeb expected. He was tempted to look, but the field continued to call to him.

“You put an Enchantment into the Stacks,” Jeb replied, “which I then used.”

“Interesting,” Quicksilver continued. “It does not appear that the shift in time within the field is also applied to the Essences.”

Bearson and Jeb both turned at that comment, confused.

Quicksilver cocked his head. “Have you not noticed that the Essence concentration within the field has been gradually increasing even since Professor Bearson and I arrived?” he asked Jeb.

Jeb focused on the field, sorting through everything that his Magical vision was trying to tell him. After straining his eyes, he was able to find what Professor Quicksilver had mentioned. The Essence within the field did seem to be growing, and the rate that it was growing itself seemed to be growing.

“Is that going to be a problem?” Jeb asked, waving a hand at the general Essence distribution within the field.

“I could not say for certain,” Professor Quicksilver said. “In an ordinary situation, yes, a constantly increasing Essence concentration would be problematic. Given that the Essence is increasing within the Academy, however-”

Quicksilver was cut off by a sudden roar.